I have a problem, er rather no. A friend of mine has this problem. See him there? See how sad and frustrated he is with his own inability. I, er... He can't make it work. You know what I mean? I mean he tries, he REALLY tries but nothing. No, er success. Yeah. No success. It's hard when someone is there telling you to perform and you've got nothing, nada zip. I'm ready to pull out all my severely tousled locks. I mean he is. Obviously. Alright, it's me. How humiliating.

As many of you have guessed I've been trying to get an open source Wordpress Windows active directory integration plug-in to work against my AD 2008 LDAP server. Tell me you've been there. What a freaking nightmare.

"Peter, can you install a new Wordpress blog for our director?"

"Sure thing. That's pretty simple actually"

"There are also a FEW plug-ins that need adding."

"OK. Usually not a big deal."

"Oh, and we need username integration."

And so the nightmare began. Someone once described insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" They're wrong. I do the same thing over and over and GET different results hourly! If that is the accepted definition of insanity, then all computer people are nuts. Ha ha. Have your little snicker.

I propose a new definition. Insanity is doing an Internet web search for 'Active Directory Integration' and believing that one of the 1,830,000 results might actually hold the answer to your stupid problem.

It's been 1 week since I started trying to resolve this."Peter. How's it going?""HA! HA HAHA! "doing, alright...?""Oh yeah! Any day now...""Okay..."

It was a rather peaceful and uneventful evening. Dinner had been consumed, pajamas had been donned, bedtime stories read and our offspring had fallen alseep in their beds. The wife and I went about our normal evening routine of cleaning up the copious piles of pink clothes and playthings scattered about our living room and dining room.

"Ouch!""Peter? What happened?""Nothing... just stepped on a 'My little Pony's' head.""Should I call and ambulance?""What a stupid way to get hurt. How can you even tell anyone? 'What happened to your foot man?!' Oh... Yeah, I stepped on 'Pinkie Pie.'"

And so it continued, tossing ponies, princesses and puzzles pieces into the toy bin, while making snide comments at each other. For the most part a pretty standard evening in the Brown house.

After that we broke out the latest Netflix arrival and watched a couple episodes of Monk. Nothing like a gifted obsessive compulsive detective who can barely function in his life, to make you feel better about yours. Any man who is afraid of milk but can pour over a dead body in all its gory details is certainly not someone who you want to be like.

The wife then announces two minutes before the end of the show, "Pause it. I need to go to the bathroom"

"He's about the solve the case.""Pause it please!""Fine."

So there I sit on the couch, waiting for the return of my bride. As I wait, staring at the paused countenance of a terrified Adrian Monk, I hear a scream!

"PETER!""WHAT! What's happening!?"

I dart into the restroom to call of "Spider!"

I round the entertainment center at full tilt and rush into the privacy of the restroom to hear my wife explain, "He dropped from the sky. Out of nowhere!""where?!""There!""Where....oh."

I saw a spindly long legged spider that could have fit on my thumb nail with room to spare. I squeezed the life out of him with forefinger and thumb.

"Seriously?""He dropped from the sky. I... well...""All done with Monk for the night?""Maybe that's not a bad idea.""Alright hon."

I've been finding myself manning the helpdesk phones more frequently in recent days. Not that it's any big deal, I'm mostly just backup. I get one or two calls an hour.

My last call was a bit odd. Users wonder why we hate them. Here's why

"I need you to install the latest version of Flash on my computer""Why?""It's free software.""I know, but why do you need it?""I want it to get to websites""Are you getting errors?""Yes!""I'll remote in so you can show me...""Oh... Uhm...""I'll right I'm in.""I can't think of any sites right now, but it's pretty much all of them.""*sigh*""Like watching movies..."

Seriously? If you're so stupid that you tell the network administrator that you're calling him to took at your machine so you can use the company bandwidth to watch movies... What do you think is coming next?

"Wow look what I found...""What? What's wrong?""I think your computer is loaded with spyware. Go ahead and log off. I'll clean it up.""How long?"What time do you leave for the day?""6:30...""That should be just about enough."

A lesson to all you users. Lie to us. We sometimes might see through it but it gives us the option to ignore it. Today I had no such option.